In today's media-driven society, there are ever more ways for users to access audio, with a plethora of products producing sound in the home, car or almost any other environment. Potential audio programmes include a large variety of music, speech, sound effects and combinations of the three. It is also increasingly common for products producing audio to be portable. This wide range of increasingly portable products which produce audio coupled with the ubiquity of audio in almost all facets of society naturally leads to an increase in situations in which there is some degree of audio-on-audio interference.
Examples of such situations might include audio produced by a laptop computer in a room with a television; a mobile phone conversation whilst a car radio is on, or in the presence of piped music in a shopping centre; or competing workstations in an office environment. It is therefore of interest in a number of areas, within the audio industry and beyond, to evaluate the perceived effect of audio interference upon a target audio programme.
A system for reproduction of different sound signals in a plurality of independent sound zones is described in GB 2472092 A. However, contrary to the method and system according to the present invention, the system described in this document uses loudspeakers placed in or adjacent each different zones. Furthermore the system divides the total frequency band into a high frequency band and a low frequency band and directs the high frequency components into the appropriate zone by using a directional loudspeaker array, whereas the amplitude, phase and delay of the low frequency components are adjusted according to the specific sound zone.